It was the bleakest of times. Food still rationed. The world so grim and grey without the dreadful excitement of war. And the chilblains that had only attacked her toes now invaded her fingers so that they looked like fat sausages attached to her hands and they itched and hurt and she could not stop herself from scratching and they broke open and wept clear liquid that soaked her gloves.
Only Keats remained. Keats could always comfort her. She would sit by the gas fire in her bed sitter and read Endymion and drink cocoa and warmth would creep through her. She would almost forget her chilblains.
She taught English to Grammar School children. The cream of the crop. Victors in the battle of the eleven plus exam. Children destined for the universities. Children from whom great things were expected. But the children had no taste for the poets of the nineteenth century. It was their misfortune to have to study them for their exams so they sat in Miss Green's class and tolerated her analysis, dutifully memorized. They tried very hard to repress their laughter when Miss Green wept as she read Ode to a Grecian Urn.
Miss Green did not weep just for the beauty of the words. She wept for her lover dead so young in the Great War, she wept for herself and her chilblains. She wept for the sniggering young people who sat before her. The world they would be forced to inhabit. A world without beauty, grace or warmth. And she spread before them the shimmering splendor of the English language and they could not see, could not feel what touched her so deeply.
There was one thing that she could offer them. The harshest requirements, the highest standards. And she demanded from them the best language, the clearest analysis of all they read. No child escaped her bitter tongue, her vengeful comments. The clever ones she hated truly. Perhaps success would come to them. Perhaps their lives would be so much better than hers. Perhaps they would not have chilblains. But she would make them pay for this brief time. She would force them to excel.
The girl Sheila tossed out facile essays of clarity and elegance. Clearly it all meant nothing to her.
``Your work is good,'' Miss Green said,''but personally this kind of stuff sickens me. It has no heart.'' She flung the essay across the desk.
The girl Sheila flinched back in surprise. Red in the face she picked up the essay and returned to her desk.
The woman Sheila never forgot.